Work on the Hands of Ruin typeface continues. I now have all the letters, but there’s more fine-tuning to do.

I’ve had plenty of help from a wonderful book: Designing Type by Karen Cheng. (There’s a nice review at The Designer’s Review of Books.) It’s a systematic comparison of the shapes of all the letters of the alphabet, in a variety of typefaces. It points out a number of frequent problems in the design of the letters, and how they’re solved in different faces.

From Cheng’s book I saw that there was a problem with the bottoms of a, d and u: the notch where the bowl connects to the stem at the bottom was rather small and unclear. I slightly thinned the bottom stroke and curved the stem into the serif to make it a little more pronounced. Also, did you know that the serifs at the top of the d and at the top of both stems of the u point to the left? Despite looking at typefaces for years, I didn’t know that.

You’ll notice that the stems on the current version of the typeface are heavier than they were originally. The typeface should be a bit on the heavy side for Hands of Ruin.

I also drew a couple of fs, eventually settling on the one with the tail. It adds a bit of a calligraphic swoosh, but without going to italics like I do with the current logotype.

There’s more work to do, though. It’s occurred to me that the serifs are thinner than the horizontal strokes, as if they don’t have any relationship to each other. I’ve been looking at other typefaces, and while there are a few that have thinner serifs than strokes, they’re pretty rare and it’s usually a very deliberate effect. I think I’d prefer to make mine match.

The spacing is still rather messy. I was hacking the sidebearings (the spaces at the sides of the letters) in an ad hoc manner, but really I should follow the recommendations of actual designers and do it systematically.

It’s strange that I find it easier to show a typeface in progress than music. With music, I want to polish everything before I present it. I suppose that, for whatever reason, the flaws in a piece of music feel much more like personal failings than the flaws in a typeface.

All in all, it’s been an easier process than I expected. Though I imagine that tackling a whole alphabet in upper- and lower-case, plus numbers and punctuation, is a more arduous process, and that the number of possible interactions that you have to think about when any text could be written is vastly more daunting.

Well, not exactly, but I’ve started work on a typeface which will have just ten letters in it: a, d, f, H, i, n, o, R, s and u, which will be just enough to write “Hands of Ruin”.

I’ve always enjoyed the visual side of Hands of Ruin: designing the website, album covers, and so on, and I’m proud in particular of the HR monogram. Even so, designing a typeface (even one that contains only ten letters) is a challenging undertaking, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have something specific to gain from it. In this case, I’m considering it a practice run for designing a full typeface. Entirely unrelated to my music, I’ve been thinking for a while about a typeface that combines the square-ish letterforms of Eurostile with the extreme weight contrasts of the Didones. It seems to me that I should get started with it soon. But I know that it’s going to be a serious and challenging project, and I want to first get some familiarity with font editing software and with the whole design process on a smaller, less intimidating project. In the same way that starting with a 13 minute silent film was my first step into writing soundtracks, a ten-letter typeface is my first step into type design.

Until now, the Hands of Ruin logotype has been written in Gentium. The monogram is also based on Gentium’s H and R. I like Gentium, but while I was thinking about the bigger typeface project, I had the idea for something heavy with an emphasis on straight diagonal lines, which seemed perfect for Hands of Ruin. In my imagination, it is something that you might see on an early 20th century grave or on a First World War memorial, though I don’t know of anything that actually looks like this. (What I mostly see looking at those memorials is that they tended to use all-caps or small-caps, so it’s hard to find anything with lowercase letters.)

The question of serif or sans serif is a tricky one. On the one hand, I feel like the shape of the letters makes more sense in a sans serif style. On the other, I’d like to use the H and R for a new version of the monogram, and I fear that will be too plain without serifs.

I’ve been using Glyphs for the actual font editing, which seems like a great bit of software. There’s clearly been a lot of thought put into the interface, and some of the features, such as being able to split outlines at their intersections, are particularly clever and useful.

So far, I have early versions of the letters to write “Hand”. The sequence so far has been H, n, d and a. With each letter I design I’m trying to do something that will tell me more about the design, but also be a small enough chunk to be manageable. I think the next letter will be s, which I know will be tricky, but I’m very curious to see how the diagonal will work in the middle of the letter. Then I’ll move on to R and f. I’m hoping that o, u and i will be relatively straightforward once I’ve got to that point. If I were designing a full typeface then there would be a lot more to consider: kerning, and possibly hinting, for example. But that’s a good reason to start small, like this.

And they called unto Lot: “Where is the man which came in unto thee this night? Bring him out that we may know him.”

James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s avant-garde silent film, Lot in Sodom, tells the biblical story of Lot, who is visited by angels and instructed to leave Sodom before it is destroyed by God for the sins of the Sodomites. Watson and Webber take an experimental approach to telling the story and make use of a variety of visual effects, including many superimposed shots.

One of my projects for 2014 was to write another soundtrack. The soundtrack that I created for Watson and Webber’s first film, The Fall of the House of Usher, has been one of the more successful things that I’ve done, plus it was just a lot of fun to work on, so I very much wanted to do another. So which film to choose? Well, Lot in Sodom was an obvious choice.

The transition from silent films to talkies happened very rapidly at the end of the twenties, so that by 1933 making a silent film was an anachronism. Watson and Webber didn’t have the budget to make a sound film, but they did commission Louis Siegel to write a score which they recorded. Siegel’s score is as avant-garde as the film is, if not more so. Though I understand that Watson and Webber were happy with it, in my opinion it’s not very effective at supporting the story. My version is somewhat less experimental, but hopefully it creates the right mood and fits the events on screen a little better.

Compared to The Fall of the House of Usher, this film was a little more challenging to write music for. It’s just under half an hour, so there’s twice as much to write. Furthermore, there are a lot of changes in mood and tempo that are difficult to compose around. And some sections call for more energetic music than I’m used to writing. So working on this project has pushed me outside of my usual styles and techniques, with the result that I’m prouder of this music than I am of The Fall of the House of Usher.

The soundtrack itself is now complete, but I’m still thinking about how it will be released. My current plan is to put the video on YouTube but also create a release on Bandcamp of the music only. I’m also planning to put The Fall of the House of Usher on Bandcamp as well. So there are still a few things to do. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from the soundtrack to whet your appetite.

It should all be ready within the next couple of months. If you’d like to be the first to know when you can see it, please subscribe to my newsletter.

I was fifteen when a friend played to me In Slaughter Natives’ second album, Enter Now The World. It was a revelation. I had never before heard something so powerfully atmospheric, so terrifying, and that spoke to me so much. Without Enter Now the World there would be no Hands of Ruin.

So a new In Slaughter Natives album is a big event here, particularly since they come along so rarely.

Cannula Coma Legio is apparently an appetiser for a forthcoming album, scheduled to appear in late 2014. It contains a mixture of new material and reworkings of older tracks. Several of these tracks were created for Chérie Roi’s fetish performances and there are some rather beautiful bondage photos on the CD sleeve.

The first three tracks are new, as far as I know. The album begins with Plague Walk My Earth. Slow martial snares build to heavier pounding percussion, while bells, orchestral sounds and manipulated opera samples create an oppressive atmosphere. Jouni Havukainen’s malevolent whispers are also buried in the mix. Definition of Being Alive contains a more mechanical rhythm, distorted vocals, and layers of noise over a simple two-note bassline, and Silent Cold Body alternates between pounding drums and the sounds of a nightmarish musical box.

The next track, Venereal Comatosem / Closed My Eyes, revisits a couple of tracks from Resurrection. It begins with a reworking of the ambient track Your Breed, and then goes into a new version of the The Vulture. This is a very nice reworking, taking the harpsichord melody from The Vulture and developing it further with additional percussion, vocals and piano. It makes me very happy to hear this sort of reworking which takes an earlier idea and fleshes it out with something new.

The next two tracks are also new. Left Arm Right Arm As My Path is a droning ambient track, with organs, a church choir, and the voice of a preacher all mixed together into a dense soup of sound. Then Gaudium et alia vita mixes dense ambient drones with some thumping drums and some rhythmic bashing on a prepared piano.

Ignis et scalpello / Angel Meat resurrects material from a very long time ago. Angel Meat originally appeared on Enter Now The World back in 1992. Ignis et scalpello provides an ambient introduction, before going into the reworked version of Angel Meat. The reworking is very slight, however. A few sounds have been laid on top of an earlier recording. This is somewhat problematic, since Angel Meat was recorded over 20 years ago, and while the production on Enter Now The World was superb, particularly considering when it was made, the types of sounds that In Slaughter Natives was using back then are very different to the sounds he uses now. This means that the sound just doesn’t fit together very well with the rest of the album. He’s added some extra percussion to the track, which goes some way to smoothing over the differences, but it’s not a complete success. All of which is a great pity, because Angel Meat is a superb track — one of his best — and a full reconstruction with Havukainen’s present, formidable production skills would be a wonderful thing to hear.

The album ends with another ambient track, Three Three Three. This lightens the mood a little with some more angelic choirs, before pounding again with some martial rhythms.

The new tracks on this album stick more to dark ambient territory than most of his previous work. Though there are martial rhythms emerging from the noise, these rarely build to full tunes. The sound design is superb. The ambiences are dense, with many layers of sound from many different sources: metallic screeches, speech, choirs, bells, rumbling drones, et cetera, et cetera, all combining to create a heavy, oppressive atmosphere. Everything sounds crisp and detailed. There are very few musicians who can create ambient soundscapes so convincingly hellish.

The lack of structure and melody, though, is the Achilles’ heel of this album. There’s nothing wrong with ambient atmospheres, and this is very fine dark ambient music, but I find it more powerful and more impressive when music contains some structure. If this were the work of anyone else then I would be satisfied with what it is, but Havukainen has created works of such magnificence that to see him making an album that falls so far short of his potential is very sad. Enter Now the World was filled with exotic grandeur, Purgate My Stain was powerfully malevolent, and this… merely meanders. Apart from the reworkings of old material, the strongest track on here is the first, but even there the melody feels simplistic. And the inclusion of Angel Meat is a reminder of how much is missing from his recent work.

If this were the only album In Slaughter Natives had made then I would love it. But this is not at the level of brilliance of Enter Now the World or even Purgate My Stain, and the curse of making something incredible is that people then expect you to do it again.

Back in April, artists Malwina Chabocka and William Andris Wood held a joint exhibition at the Gasoline Rooms gallery in East London. In addition to doing a live Hands of Ruin set at the private view, I was asked to provide a mix that would play throughout the event. I wanted to choose music that would complement the paintings and also reflect the tastes of the artists. While it’s perhaps a little dark for an exhibition opening, I was satisfied that it suited both the space and the paintings. It spans a number of genres, with a focus on goth and shoegaze, but also branching out into folk, metal and electronica. There wasn’t much time to put the mix together, and it had to last several hours, so it’s not as polished as some of my other mixes. It’s split into three parts.

A bunch of CD purchases from Cold Spring have paid off, eventually, in the form of a mix focussing on martial industrial music. I actually put this one together back in September 2013 and had intended to upload it sooner, but life kept intervening. I think it’s a really nice collection of tracks, though, so I’m glad finally to share it.

The Hour of the King – Stories of the Lost is a joint exhibition by painters Malwina Chabocka and William Andris Wood that tells tales of solitude and emotional disintegration. I’m very glad to have been asked to contribute music for the private view, so I will be playing a live set of music chosen to accompany the images. If you’re in London on April 3rd, I’d love to see you there.

Malwina Chabocka is an illustrator and author who is currently developing her first graphic novel, The Hour of the King. It is a story about a relationship between a little girl and her grandmother who is slowly developing a mental condition and getting lost in the world of her visions and paranoias. Loosely based on Malwina’s childhood memories, it is a dark tale of emotional disintegration, seen through the eyes of a child who reaches out for the fantastical and the symbolic as a way to decipher the incomprehensible reality. The paintings, which are based on a 250+ image storyboard strip, range from semi-realistic, to surreal and near-abstract. Various portraits of the two characters are incorporated into dream-like landscapes and architecture.

William Andris Wood is a devoted figurative painter with the ethos and techniques borrowed from the Old Masters like Rembrandt, Goya, or Delacroix. His newest work, Stories of the Lost, is a series of portraits of people who have accidentally or purposefully gone off the beaten track, towards emotional solitude, denial or death. Drawing from his personal experience of depression, William has created incredibly moving portraits of a group of regulars from a shabby Oxford pub, which enable the viewer to take a closer look at people who day by day escape from their life and hide themselves behind a pint glass and a pool table.

I will be playing a live set of music selected to accompany the paintings, which will draw from Empire & Dust and Iudicium as well as some newer, unreleased material.